Will Amazon weather the Skiff?

Amazon.com's Kindle may be leading the e-reader pack, but it's hasn't exactly been a hit with newspaper publishers, with Ruport Murdoch and others grumbling about the huge cut that Amazon takes of Kindle-based subscriptions (reportedly 70 percent). Now Hearst is revealing details of its Kindle competitor, a service called Skiff that lets newspaper and magazine publishers deliver content to multiple devices including e-readers, smartphones and netbooks and keep the majority of the revenue.

Skiff, which grew out of a Hearst project called FirstPaper, is expected to launch in 2010 and will include a digital store. It's an interesting effort by a publisher to deliver content to devices itself, rather than cede that function to companies like Amazon. Hearst is also at work on its own electronic reader.

Skiff will be tailored to image-rich newspaper and magazine content, with "visually appealing layouts, high-resolution graphics, rich typography and dynamic updates." And it will employ some kind of advertising around newspaper and magazine articles, which is something Kindle and others don't do at the moment.

Hearst will presumably put its own publications on Skiff, though it didn't name which ones (the company owns the San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Cosmopolitan, and a variety of other media, including the online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer). Will the Skiff make waves for Kindle, Nook, Que, the rumored Apple tablet and all the other reading devices out there?

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About Eric Engleman

ERIC ENGLEMAN is senior technology staff writer for TechFlash and the Puget Sound Business Journal, covering online retail giant Amazon.com. Engleman tracks Amazon's increasingly complex business, spanning ecommerce, Kindle, cloud computing, and more. He's been covering technology and other industries for the Business Journal since 2003.

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